Secret streets

You’d think that Oakland has erased all of its dirt roads, but one afternoon I found this one, running north after a hairpin turn past the end of Florence Avenue.

Florence ends near a power substation that’s labeled, if I recall it correctly, with the word “Landvale.” Naturally I thought of Landvale Road, the nearly-lost street that has been wiped out by Route 13. Is this the lost south end of Landvale? Or is it a leg of the old Oakland & Antioch Railroad bed that runs through Montclair? If my calf ever heals, I’m heading back here.

UPDATE: I visited the Cal Library’s historic topo maps site and found the road mapped as the railroad grade in 1947, before the Warren Freeway was put in, and shown as the “old railroad grade” in 1959. For now, I guess it’s a decidedly informal walking trail for the neighborhoodcertainly a long walk to get there from anywhere else.

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This entry was posted on 10 June 2011 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Oakland geology puzzles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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9 Responses to “Secret streets”

It looks like Florence Avenue and Florence Terrace were once routed together as a single street, but southeast of the end of Landvale Road (at least as it was in 1939), which ended at Broadway Terrace. I would have put my bet on this being the Sacramento Northern right of way.

Thank you for this blog. Even though I don’t leave comments, I check in every so often. Maybe you’ve covered this before, but do you ever lead geology walks around Oakland?It would be fun to tromp the hills and see the vista through a geologist’s eyes.

Daniel Levy, who has traced the Sacramento Northern through Oakland, and who put together the interpretive panels up near Lake Temescal, will be around this summer. I’ll send him a link to this post, and perhaps he can give you more details!

It’s a couple older maps from 1877 and 1912 I found online, along with automobile maps from 1936, 1950’s, and 1967; plus Open Street Map and aerial view- all georeferenced and zoomable. You can find a spot on the modern map and then click to an older map layer. Some of the scans aren’t perfect, and some of the gas station maps have errors. But you can see in 1912 that Florence ave used to include Estates dr. and curved south where it met the Oakland-Antioch Railway.